Testing the Hypothesis of a Plane Wavefront of a Signal Received by a Multi-Element Antenna Array

The problem of plane wavefront hypothesis testing is investigated, which corresponds to the assumption that the source of radiation is located in the far-field zone. Two composite hypotheses are considered: the null hypothesis H
0
– the wavefront of the signal is plane with an unknown angle-of-arrival (AoA); and the alternative hypothesis H
1
– the wavefront of the signal has a deterministic but unknown shape. It makes possible to use an approach based on the GLR (Generalized Likelihood Ratio) test. To make a distinction between the two hypotheses, maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of the signal wavefront are used for each of the formulated hypotheses. The decision statistic is formed as the square modulus of the difference between the estimates of the wavefront vectors for each of the hypotheses. The simulations of the proposed testing scheme have demonstrated its high efficiency